Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Suggested Citation:"The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett." National Research Council. 2008. Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12023.

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

The Science of Emotion:
What People Believe, What the Evidence
Shows, and Where to Go From Here
Lisa Feldman Barrett
As common sense has it, emotions are triggered automatically, happen
to people, and cause them to act in specific and diagnostic ways. An offense
triggers anger. A death triggers sadness. A gun triggers fear. As the pent-up
energy of an emotion is discharged, the result is a largely inescapable set of
stereotyped outputs that occur rapidly, involuntarily. People feel the heat of
anger and attack, the despair of sadness and cry, or the dread of fear and
freezeâor even run away. The given quality of a personâs own experience,
and the way that emotion seems to control behavior without awareness, is
usually taken as proof that emotions are automatic responses to things that
happen in the world over which people have little control. Knowledge, ex-
pectations, and beliefs seem to have little impact on emotion, although they
can regulate a response once it has been triggered. As a consequence, people
assume that emotions can overcome them, rapidly overriding whatever else
they might have been doing, thinking, and feeling. Regulation, if it occurs
at all, happens later, after the emotion has taken hold. Anger, sadness, and
fear causes behavior, just as lightning causes thunder.
This folk conception of emotionâwith varying degrees of elaboration
and complexityâforms the basis of a consensual view that guides the scien-
tific study of emotion. Despite the differences in their surface features, the
most prominent models of emotion incorporate the intuition that emotions
are automatic syndromes of behavior and bodily reactions. Those models
This work was supported an NIMH Independent Scientist Research Award (K02 MH001981)
to Lisa Feldman Barrett from the National Institute of Mental Health.
189

190 HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN MILITARY CONTEXTS
also share a common set of beliefs about the nature of emotion: emotions
are categories with firm boundaries that can be observed in nature (i.e., in
the brain or body) and are therefore recognized, not constructed, by the
human mind. People know an instance of anger when they see it in the face,
voice, or body of another person or feel it in themselves.
In this paper I argue that despite the general importance of emotion
in the science of the mind and the ever increasing pace of research on
emotion, knowledge about emotion has accumulated more slowly than
for other comparable concepts, such as memory or attention, because the
acceptance of these commonsense assumptions are not warranted by the
available empirical evidence. I then consider what moving beyond a com-
monsense view might look like and what it would mean for the scientific
study of emotion.
A BRIEF HISTORY
The Accepted History
The received wisdom in psychology is that the science of emotion began
with a golden age, with Darwinâs (1859/1965) publication of Expressions
of the Emotions in Man and Animals, where he wrote that emotions cause
stereotypic bodily expressions. Darwinâs book was followed by Jamesâ 1884
critique, What Is an Emotion?, in which James argued that bodily activity
causes emotion, not the other way around. James, in turn, was criticized by
Cannon in his 1927 paper, The James-Lange Theory of Emotions: A Criti-
cal Examination and an Alternative Theory, in which Cannon argued that
the body cannot cause emotion because visceral changes are too slow and
too difficult to feel and that the same visceral changes occur in both emo-
tional and nonemotional states. Psychology, the story goes, by then in the
grip of behaviorism, sank into the dark ages and did not produce anything
worthwhile on the topic of emotion for about 40 years, except for some
important neurobiology papers by Papez (1937) and MacLean (1949).
In the conventional story, a renaissance period then emerged in the
1960s, first with Magda Arnoldâs 1960 Emotion and Personality, fol-
lowed by Tomkins 1962 and 1963 books on Affect-Imagery-Consciousness.
Schachter and Singerâs 1962 paper, Cognitive, Social, and Physiological
Determinants of an Emotional State, was also published around this time.
According to many, these works rescued the scientific study of emotion
from the abyss of behaviorism and launched the modern era of scientific
research on emotion.
Sylvan Tomkins became the inspiration for what has been called the
âbasic emotionâ approach. Basic emotion models share the core assump-
tion that there are certain biologically privileged kinds of emotion. Each

THE SCIENCE OF EMOTION 191
kind of emotion issue is thought to come from a dedicated neural program
or circuit that arose through evolution and is hardwired into the human
brain at birth. These circuits are homologous with those found in nonhu-
man mammals, and they are responsible for the automatic syndrome of
hormonal, muscular, and autonomic effects that constitutes the distinctive
signature for that kind of emotional response. In essence, the basic emotion
approach is a commonsense view of emotion.
Arnold, along with Schachter and Singer, it is said, launched what is
called the appraisal approach to emotion. The core assumption of appraisal
models is that a personâs interpretation of an event or situation is necessary
for an emotional response; emotions are not triggered merely by a stimu-
lus in a reflexive or habitual way. In Arnoldâs terms, a meaning analysis is
performed on the situation that is thought to evoke or triggers emotion. In
Schachter and Singerâs terms, a meaning analysis is performed on a general
state of arousal in the body to render it meaningful. The initial empirical
evidence for the Schachter and Singer (1962) model was weak at the outset
(Reisenzein, 1983), so that Arnoldâs version of appraisal theory became
formative for the majority of appraisal models that followed (e.g., Scherer,
1984; Frijda, 1986; Roseman, Spindel, and Jose, 1990).
Revising History
From a certain vantage point, the conventional history is accurate.
Tomkins, Arnold, and to a lesser extent, Schachter and Singer, did have an
enormous influence on shaping modern scientific thinking about emotion.
But the accepted history of the field has itself been shaped by common-
sense, while the actual historical record is more complicated, and more
interesting. For example: Darwin did not emphasize the functionality of
emotion; he argued that the facial behaviors associated with internal emo-
tional states (what he called âemotional expressionsâ) are often vestiges
of the evolutionary past, like a tailbone or an appendix. The emphasis on
functionality came later (Allport, 1924). William James may have inspired
a century of research whose goal was to uncover the invariant autonomic
nervous system (ANS) and behavioral patterns that corresponded to anger,
sadness, fear, and several other emotions, but he did not, in fact, argue for
one invariant biobehavioral pattern for each emotion category. âSurely
there is no definite affection of anger in an entitative senseâ (James, 1894,
p. 206). When James stated that distinct physiologic and behavioral pat-
terns produced an emotional feeling, he meant a specific instance of emo-
tion (e.g., an instance of anger) was distinct from other instances, as long
as it feels distinct.
Arnold explicitly relied on commonsense in crafting her model of emo-
tion (Arnold, 1960, Ch. 1) and believed, following basic emotion models,

192 HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN MILITARY CONTEXTS
that anger, sadness, fear, and so on are different biological kinds that, in
essence, are grounded in distinct behaviors. Arnoldâs particular brand of
appraisal model and those she inspired have a lot more in common with
basic emotion models than is commonly assumed (see Barrett, 2006a; Bar-
rett, Mesquita, Ochsner, and Gross, 2007). Arnold wrote:
For each emotion, there is a distinct pattern that remains more or less
constant and is recognized as characteristic for that emotion. . . . Whether
we are afraid of a bear, a snake, or a thunderstorm, our bodily sensations
during these experiences are very much alike . . . there will always be a
core that is similar from person to person and even from man to animal
(Arnold, 1960, p. 179).
Appraisals were imbued with the power to diagnose objects or situations
as personally relevant and were given responsibility for triggering emotions
that pre-exist within the individual.
Most important, the dark ages in emotion science never really existed.
From 1900 to the 1970s, many papers and books were published on the
topic of emotion. However, they were rooted in assumptions by Wundt
(1897) and had a decidedly non-commonsense flavor: emotions are psy-
chological events that can be decomposed into more basic psychological
elements (Brenner, 1974; Dashiell, 1928; Duffy, 1934, 1941; Hunt, 1941;
Dunlap, 1932; Mandler, 1975; Ruckmick, 1936; Schachter, 1959; Titch-
ener, 1909; Young, 1943). The common assumption in these works is that
the human experience of emotion does not necessarily reveal the causal
structure of emotion. Many of these works are grounded in the observation
that empirical evidence had thus far failed to produce clear and consistent
evidence for the biobehavioral distinctiveness of as the events that people
colloquially call anger, sadness, and fear.
The only universal element in any emotional situation is the use by all the
subjects of a common term of report, i.e., âfear.â That is, while stimu-
lus conditions and actual experiential content may vary from subject to
subject, all decide upon the emotion and give it a common label, âfearâ
(Hunt, 1941, p. 266).
This observation has been echoed in several recent papers devoted to the
topic (Barrett, 2006a; Ortony and Turner, 1990; Russell, 2003).
The Empirical Record
The Commonsense Model
A comprehensive review of the entire evidentiary body of emotion re-
search is well beyond the scope of this paper for both practical and logical

THE SCIENCE OF EMOTION 193
reasons. Practically speaking, several recent reviews of evidence in support
of basic emotion (e.g., Ekman, 1992; Ekman, Campos, Davidson, and de
Waal, 2003; Keltner and Ekman, 2000; Panksepp, 1998) and appraisal
models (e.g., Scherer, Schorr, and Johnstone, 2001) already exist. My goal
in this paper is to provide a complementary review that highlights and
summarizes evidence that is potentially disconfirming of the commonsense
view. A focus on disconfirming evidence is not only practical, it is logically
preferable (Popper, 1959) because it will allow interested readers to evalu-
ate whether the evidence is weak enough to be dismissed or strong enough
to call the commonsense view into question.
Bodily Activationâ Despite rigorous research efforts, the idea that cat-
egories of emotion (e.g., anger, sadness, fear) are distinguished by distinct
patterns of autonomic response remains debatable (for a review, see Barrett,
2006a). Although some studies have reported emotion-specific patterns of
ANS and behavioral activation for at least some emotions (e.g., Ekman,
Levenson, and Friesen, 1983; Levenson, Carstensen, Friesen, and Ekman,
1991; Levenson, Ekman, and Friesen, 1990; Mauss, Levenson, McCarter,
Wilhelm, and Gross, 2005; Nyklicek, Thayer, and Van Doornen, 1997;
Sinha, Lovallo, and Parsons, 1992; Stemmler, 1989; see Levenson, 1992),
these are set against a backdrop of studies that suggest the claim of invari-
ant emotion-specific ANS activity is unwarranted. Meta-analytic evidence
indicates that there are few, if any, stable physiological patterns for catego-
ries of emotion (Cacioppo, Berntson, Larsen, Poehlmann, and Ito, 2000).
Face and Voiceâ The lack of emotion-related patterning that is ob-
served in autonomic measurements can also be seen in almost all mea-
surement modalities (Barrett, 2006a). There is an on-going, lively debate
about whether perception-based studies of the face and voice (where one
person judges emotion in the face or voice of another) give evidence of dis-
crete emotion categories (see, e.g., Ekman, 1994; Elfenbein and Ambady,
2002; Izard, 1994; Russell, 1994, 1995; Keltner and Ekman, 2000; Rus-
sell, Bachorowski, and Fernandez-Dols, 2003). It is important to consider,
however, that studies of emotion perception (often called âemotion recog-
nitionâ) commonly use posed facial configurations that depict caricatures
of emotion. In contrast to a prototypical expression (an expression that is
closest to the average set of features for a kind of emotion), a caricature
departs from the central tendency of its category in a way that will make
it maximally distinctive from other categories. For example, an anger pro-
totype would depict the average set of facial movements that have been
identified as naturally occurring in actual anger episodes; in contrast, an
anger caricature depicts facial movements that are exaggerated to maxi-
mally distinguish it from facial depictions of other emotion categories, such

194 HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN MILITARY CONTEXTS
as fear. In comparison with prototypes, caricatures are more accurately
categorized as belonging to a concept when the concepts in question are
highly interrelated (Goldstone, Steyvers, and Rogosky, 2003).
Production-based studies of emotion in the face and voice (in which
researchers measure facial muscle movements and vocal behaviors during
emotionally evocative events) have thus far failed to provide clear evidence
of signature patterns for particular categories of emotion. Recent sum-
maries of the literature conclude that the bulk of evidence has failed to
support the hypothesis that distinct patterns of facial muscle activity and
vocal acoustics distinguish anger, sadness, fear, and so on (Cacioppo et al.,
1997, 2000; Russell et al., 2003). This assessment is consistent with the
evidence from infant (Camras, Lambrecht, and Michel, 1996; Camras et
al., 2002; Hiatt, Compos, and Emde, 1979) and animal communication
research (Seyfarth and Cheney, 2003): it has become clear that babies and
animals rarely produce involuntary, reflexive displays of their emotional
states. Taken together, this evidence suggests that facial movements and
vocal signals do not necessarily âdisplayâ information about the senderâs
emotional state (see Russell et al., 2003), even though people routinely
perceive those behaviors as coordinated âexpressions.â
Instrumental Behaviorsâ The evidence is also lacking for distinct be-
havioral profiles for each category of emotion (for a review, see Barrett,
2006a). Behavioral responses, such as flight or fight, are specific, context-
bound attempts to deal with a situation and so correspond to situational
demands (Cacioppo et al., 2000; Lang, Bradley, and Cuthbert, 1990). If a
fear-situation is defined by the presence of threat (e.g., a predator), then fear
is associated with a range of different behaviors (from vigilance, to freezing,
to flight, to attack), depending on the functional demands of the situation.
In rats, for example, the threat (or defense) system is organized so that an
animal will engage in different behaviors, depending on its psychological
distance from a predator (e.g., Fanselow and Lester, 1988); this suggests
that there is no one-to-one correspondence between a particular instru-
mental behavior and a specific emotion. Similar behavior-situation links
have been observed for systems that secure desired objects, like food (Tim-
berlake, 1994) and sexual behavior (Akins, Domjan, and Gutierrez, 1994;
Akins, 2000; see Bouton, 2005). Similarly, people can attack or withdraw
or even smile in anger. Given that physiological activation provides support
for behavioral demands (Obrist, 1981; Obrist et al., 1970), and the same
feeling can be associated with a variety of behaviors, it seems unlikely that
scientists will ever find emotion-specific autonomic patterning.
Subjective Experienceâ Contrary to popular belief, it is far from clear
that everyone necessarily experiences anger, sadness, fear, and so on, as

THE SCIENCE OF EMOTION 195
qualitatively different states. Despite early factor analytic evidence that self-
reports produced discrete groupings of subjective experience (e.g., Borgatta,
1961; Nowlis, 1965; Izard, 1972), there is little consistent evidence that
people, on average, routinely distinguish between feelings of anger, fear,
sadness, and so on. Such reports of negative emotion experience tend to
correlate so highly that they often fail capture any unique variance (e.g.,
Feldman, 1993; Watson and Clark, 1984; Watson and Tellegen, 1985).
Even scales that are explicitly built to measure discrete emotions tend to
suffer from high correlations between reports of like-valenced states (e.g.,
Boyle, 1986; Zuckerman and Lubin, 1985; Watson and Clark, 1994). As a
result, many researchers measure broad dimensions of positive and negative
activation (e.g., Watson, Clark, and Tellegen, 1988), pleasure-displeasure
(valence), or feelings of activation or arousal (e.g., Barrett and Russell 1998;
Mayer and Gaschke, 1988; Russell, Weiss, and Mendelsohn, 1989).
Idiographic studies of emotion experience demonstrate that there is
considerable individual variation in emotional granularityâthe extent to
which people characterize their experiences in discrete emotional or in
broadly affective terms (Barrett, 1998, 2004; Barrett, Gross et al., 2001;
Feldman, 1995). Individuals high in granularity use the words âangry,â
âsad,â and âafraidâ to represent distinct experiences; those low in granular-
ity use the words to represent a more general state of feeling âunpleasant.â
The same is generally true for pleasant emotional states, with those in high
in granularity using the words âhappy,â âcalm,â and âexcitedâ to refer
to distinct experiences, while those lower in granularity use these words
to refer to a more general âpleasantâ affective state. Individuals who are
granular for unpleasant emotions also tend to be granular for pleasant emo-
tions, although the two are not perfectly correlated (Linquist and Barrett, in
press). These differences are not fully accounted for by verbal intelligence
or how well people understand the meaning of emotion words.
Neural Circuitryâ Meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies of emotion
have failed to provide evidence for consistent and specific brain circuitry
that distinguishes anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and happiness (for reviews,
see Barrett 2006a; Barrett and Wager, 2006). In general, the findings from
these meta-analyses are very similar to the pattern of findings for the
psychophysiological data on emotion: unique activation patterns for each
category of emotion were generally less consistent than expected. Further-
more, alternative explanations were not ruled out when consistency was
observed. For example, the amygdala is widely believed to represent a core
âfear systemâ in the brain, yet the meta-analyses found that no more than
60 percent of studies of fear reported increased activation in the amygdala.
Moreover, stimulus features such as novelty (e.g., Wilson and Rolls, 1993;
Wright, Martis et al., 2003) or uncertainty (Davis and Whalen, 2001; Kim,

196 HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN MILITARY CONTEXTS
Somerville et al., 2003; Whalen, Rauch et al., 1998) also activate the amyg-
dala and were not ruled out as alternative explanations for the observed
findings. Furthermore, simple perceptual cues (e.g., eye gaze) determine
whether or not facial depictions of fear result in an increase in amygdala
activation (Adams, Gordon et al., 2003), and individuals with amygdala
damage can correctly classify facial depictions of fear when their attention
is directed towards the eyes of a stimulus face (Adolphs, Gosselin et al.,
2005). Taken together, the evidence suggests that the amygdala is not the
brain locus of fear, although it seems to play an important role in affective
processing.
What the Evidence Shows
Even as scientific studies of emotion do not provide clear evidence for
the biological or behavioral distinction between emotion categories, they
do give clear and consistent evidence for a distinction between positive
and negative affective states. Objective measurements used in the study of
emotion, such as peripheral nervous system activation (Bradley and Lang,
2000); Cacioppo et al., 1997, 2000), facial movements (Cacioppo et al.,
1997, 2000; Messinger, 2002), vocal cues (Bachorowski, 1999), expressive
behavior (Cacioppo and Gardner, 1999), and neural activations (Barrett
and Wager, 2006) all give evidence of the intensity or hedonic quality
(pleasantness or unpleasantness) of a personâs affective state. Furthermore,
facial behaviors, reports of experience, and peripheral nervous system ac-
tivity show strong correspondences for the affective properties of valence
and intensity; effect sizes range from 0.76 to 0.90 (Lang, Greenwald et al.,
1993), even when they do not show strong correspondences for anger, sad-
ness, fear, and so on (for a review, see Barrett, 2006a). That is, affect, rather
than emotion, seems to meet the criteria for a biologically verifiable state.
âAffectâ is generally used to refer to any state that represents how an
object or situation influences a person. The term âcore affectâ has been
recently introduced to refer to a basic, psychologically primitive state that
can be described by two psychological properties: hedonic valence (plea-
sure/displeasure) and arousal (activation/sleepiness). It is also possible to
describe core affect in terms of related properties, such as energetic arousal
(wide awake/sleepy) and tense arousal (tense/calm) (Rafaeli and Revelle,
2006; Thayer, 1989), or as negative activation (anxiety to calm) and posi-
tive activation (excitement to fatigue) (Watson and Tellegen, 1985). These
terminology differences really amount to preferences in how one describes
the same affective space, and the different dimensions can be mathemati-
cally derived from one another (Russell and Barrett, 1999). Core affect
has been characterized as the constant stream of transient alterations in
an organismâs neurophysiological and somatovisceral states that represent

THE SCIENCE OF EMOTION 197
its immediate relationship to the flow of changing events (Barrett, 2006b;
Russell, 2003; Russell and Barrett, 1999). In a sense, core affect is a neu-
rophysiologic barometer of an individualâs relationship to an environment
at a given time. To the extent that an object or event changes a personâs
âinternal milieu,â it can be said to have affective meaning; these changes
are what is meant when one says that a person has an affective reaction to
an object or stimulus. They are the means by which information about the
external world is translated into an internal code or representations (Nauta,
1971; Damasio, 1999; Ongur and Price, 2000).
Core affect functions as a kind of âcore knowledgeâ (see Spelke, 2000),
the hard wiring for which is present at birth (Bridges, 1932; Emde, Gains-
bauer, and Harmon, 1976; Spitz, 1965; Sroufe, 1979) and is homologous
in other mammalian species (Cardinal, Parkinson et al., 2002; Rolls, 1999;
Schneirla, 1959). Core affect is universal to all humans (Russell, 1983;
Wierzbicka, 1992; Scherer, 1997; Mesquita, 2003), is evident in all instru-
ment-based measures of emotion (for a review, see Barrett, 2006b), and
forms the core of emotion experience (Barrett et al., 2007; Russell, 2003).
Core affect (i.e., the neurophysiological state) is available to consciousness,
and it is experienced as feeling pleasant or unpleasant (valence) and, to a
lesser extent, as activated or deactivated (arousal) (for a review, see Rus-
sell and Barrett, 1999). If core affect is a neurophysiologic barometer that
sums up an individualâs relationship to the environment at a given time,
then self-reported feelings are the barometer readings. Feelings of core af-
fect provide a common metric for comparing qualitatively different events
(Cabanac, 2002). Core affect is a precondition for first-person experiences
of the world, language fluency, and memory; it modulates sensory process-
ing to influence what people actually see, and in doing it so forms the core
of conscious experience (for a review, see Duncan and Barrett, 2007).
A personâs core affective state is largely, although not exclusively, in-
fluenced by a process that has been called evaluation (Bargh and Ferguson,
2000; Brendl and Higgins, 1995; Tesser and Martin, 1996), appraisal
(Arnold, 1960) or primary appraisal (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984), or
valuation (Barrett, 2006c). Valuation can be thought of as a simple form
of meaning analysis in which something is judged as helpful or harmful
in a given instance, producing some change in a personâs core affective
state. Judgments about whether stimuli or events are helpful or harmful or
rewarding or threatening (whether those judgments are fleeting and auto-
matic or more deliberate and effortful) help to influence the valence prop-
erty of core affect. There is consensus across a broad swath of psychological
research that humans evaluate and that the process of valuation is a basic
aspect of mammalian functioning. People continually and automatically
evaluate situations and objects (Bargh and Ferguson, 2000, but see Storbeck
and Robinson, 2004) for their relevance and valueâthat is, whether or not

198 HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN MILITARY CONTEXTS
object properties signify something important to well-being, leading to mo-
ment-to-moment fluctuations in core affect. An object is valuable when it
is important to survival (Davis and Whalen, 2001) or when it is relevant to
immediate goals (Rogers 1959; Smith and Kirby, 2001). Valuation largely
occurs outside of awareness and conscious control (for a recent review, see
Moors and De Houwer, 2006).
Summary
Overall, the available evidence suggests that there is no clear objective
way to measure the experience of emotion. Emotion categoriesâsuch as
anger, sadness, and fearâhave thus far not clearly and consistently revealed
themselves in the data on feelings, facial and vocal behaviors, peripheral
nervous system responses, or instrumental behaviors. It has not yet been
shown whether there are distinct brain markers for each emotion, but so
far the available evidence does not encourage a commonsense view. How-
ever, scientists are able to assess a personâs affective state (i.e., pleasure and
displeasure) by indirect (see Berridge and Winkielman, 2003), experiential
(Russell and Barrett, 1999), and objective means (in the face or body, e.g.,
Cacioppo et al., 2000). This affective state is a basic and core element in
emotional responding.
THE EMOTION PARADOX
The evidence presented thus far frames a fundamental emotion paradox:
people seem compelled by their own experiences to believe that emotions
are biological categories given by nature, but objective, instrument-based
measures of emotion provide evidence only of a personâs core affective state.
How this dilemma is resolved depends on how seriously the evidence that
is inconsistent with the commonsense view is treated.
One way to resolve the emotion paradox is to assume that the data are
flawed or otherwise not sufficient for testing the hypothesis that discrete
emotions have distinct biobehavioral signatures. Social factors, such as
display rules (cf. Ekman, 1972) or other regulation processes, might mask
or inhibit prepotent responses that would otherwise be easy to measure.
Response systems differ in their temporal dynamics, sensitivity, and reli-
ability of measurement, and this might obscure the measurement of any
patterns that exist (cf. Bradley and Lang, 2000). Moreover, laboratory stud-
ies of emotion do not use emotion-eliciting stimuli that are strong enough
to produce prototypical emotional responses and this may be why they are
not observed (cf. Tassinary and Cacioppo, 1992).

THE SCIENCE OF EMOTION 199
In any of the research areas reviewed thus far, it is possible to find ad-
ditional caveats to explain why the expected results have not been found.
Self-reports are flawed, and experience may be epiphenomenal to emotion.
Facial muscle measurements are too coarse-grained to capture complex sets
of facial movements, and perceiver-based judgments of facial movements
provide stronger evidence for the commonsense view. Most psychophysi-
ological studies measure only a few output channels, providing a less than
optimal test of the question of autonomic specificity. And neuroimaging
investigations of emotion are just beginning, tend to confuse emotion
perception with emotion induction, and do not give sufficient spatial reso-
lution (not to mention the fact that people must lay immobilized inside a
scanner). In sum, it is possible that distinct, natural kinds of emotions will
reveal themselves in the brain and body if only scientists could find the right
eliciting stimuli, have better measurement tools, or use more sophisticated
and precise research designs.
Although any of these explanations may be correct, an equally plau-
sible explanation is that scientists have failed to observe stable and reliable
biobehavioral patterns for each emotion because they are not there. If the
commonsense view is held to the same empirical standard as other emo-
tion models, then it is fair to say that the supporting evidence is equivocal
at best. The evidence suggests the real possibility that there are no emo-
tion mechanisms in the brain waiting to be discovered, producing a priori
packets of outcomes in the body. Emotions may not be given to humans
by nature, which raises the question of whether they are the appropriate
categories to support a cumulative science.
SUGGESTIONS FOR A NEW PARADIGM
For the most part, the field of emotion has accepted the first solution
to the emotion paradox by explaining away disconfirming evidence as the
result of imprecise measures, flawed experimental designs, and so on. This
solution comes with large price tag: some of the most fundamental ques-
tions about human emotion remain unanswered, and the majority of the
empirical findings related to emotion do not seem to produce cumulative
knowledge in the procrustean process of trying to fit the data into discrete
categories. To be sure, better research about emotion means conducting bet-
ter studies with better research tools. But it may also require a fundamental
change in the way that researchers ask and answer questions about emo-
tion. In essence, progress may require crafting a new scientific paradigm
for the study of emotion.

200 HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN MILITARY CONTEXTS
Asking Better Questions
First and foremost, a better science of emotion means asking different
sorts of questions. Instead of asking âIs âXâ a real emotion?,â one might
ask âHow can science account for the richness and variability in emotional
life?â Rather than asking why physiology, behavior, and experience fail to
correlate when emotion is measured, scientists might ask what is important
about the instances when they do correspond. Rather than asking about
whether people are accurate in decoding the emotional displays of others,
scientists might ask âWhat is the function of perceiving emotion in oth-
ers?â and âWhat does it mean to get this perception ârightâ?â Rather than
asking âHow do we evoke pure instances of emotion, uncontaminated by
contextual influences or language?,â scientists might ask âDo context and
language have an intrinsic role to play in shaping the form and function of
an emotional response?â And finally, rather than asking âHow can scien-
tists conduct better studies, with better methods and tools, to empirically
locate the biobehavioral signatures for anger, sadness, and fear?,â perhaps
scientists should think about why scientists typically theorize about and
focus their empirical efforts on caricatured emotional episodes when they
are, in the best scenarios, rare.
The barriers to asking better questions are mainly psychological. The
commonsense view is compelling. It fits with the way people talk about
emotion everyday. A person says âYou made me angry,â as in âYou trig-
gered my anger reflex.â Anger explains why someone yelled and perhaps
even justifies it. This idea underlies, often implicitly, peopleâs construal of
emotions in themselves and others. Experiences of anger, fear, etc., feel
like they erupt or âhappen,â as the causal entityâthe emotionâhijacks a
personâs mind and body. Sometimes people behave in ways that they would
rather notâin ways that do not correspond to more reasoned responses
that they identify as part of their human self.
Denying a commonsense view of emotion means that people must ac-
cept that their perceptions of the world are not a valid indicator of how
the world works. Because people perceive anger in themselves and in oth-
ers, they believe anger exists as an entity to be discovered somewhere in
the brain or body. People believe that their experiences reveal reality. In
evolutionary biology, this is called the âerror of arbitrary aggregationâ
(Lewontin, 2000). In social psychology, we call it ânaÃ¯ve realism.â
Abandoning a commonsense view would mean being free from a basic
form of essentialism that captures well how people think about the events
and objects in their everyday lives (Bloom, 2003). Peopleâs naÃ¯ve intuition
that emotions have essences may be an example of psychological essential-
ism (Medin and Ortony, 1989). People need not have even the foggiest idea
what the essence of a category is to continue believing in it. It has been

THE SCIENCE OF EMOTION 201
argued that psychological essentialism is an adaptive and universal way of
parsing the world (Gelman and Hirschfeld, 1999; see also Quine, 1977).
But as Quine points out, psychological essentialism may produce a bias in
how peopleâincluding scientistsâformulate ideas about the world.
An Inductive Approach
As a second step, a new paradigm for the scientific study of emotion
might take a more inductive approach. Rather than beginning with an
abstract, theoretical construct (e.g., anger) that researchers try to identify
in human behavior, perhaps researchers could concentrate their empirical
efforts on identifying which observable or measurable phenomena (e.g., car-
diovascular changes, facial expressions, startle responses, EEG recordings,
subjective experience, conscious thoughts) are implicated across instances
of emoting and observe, rather than prescribe, their relationships in varying
circumstances and time frames. If instances of emotion can be characterized
by empirical coherences, then observations should eventually demonstrate
reliable patterns of relationships among the necessary components of emo-
tion. Alternatively, new constructs may emerge, and they may have little
resemblance to folk or commonsense categories of emotion.
The barriers to an inductive science of emotion are practical, technolog-
ical, and ethical. First, no one scientist can be an expert in every scholarly
domain that includes emotion, nor can he or she have expertise in every
measurement method that is used. As a result, interdisciplinary approaches
to the study of emotion are necessary, with scientists from different domains
of expertise working together to craft a multidisciplinary measurement en-
vironment. This means that scientists from different disciplines must craft
a common scientific language. Second, there are technological challenges
involved in an inductive approach to studying emotion, such as the ability
to capture and integrate measurements of the face, the body, the brain, and
experience, in real time. Third, there are ethical considerations, because it is
generally considered unethical to expose people to stimuli that will lead to
an intense or dramatic emotional episode. In most current research, emotion
is induced in rather limited circumstances, such as having participants view
pictures, watch movies, or relive prior experiences of emotion. Typically,
participants are sitting still throughout an entire experiment. Creating more
naturalistic laboratory environments in which participants can interact with
one another and move around (e.g., using immersive virtual environments)
or crafting devices to allow real-world capture of experiential, physiologi-
cal, and social interaction data (e.g., context-sensitive experience-sampling)
would be necessary for an inductive science of emotion.

202 HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN MILITARY CONTEXTS
A Specific Theoretical Framework: The Conceptual Act Model
A third requirement for a new scientific paradigm for the study of emo-
tion is a model with a clear and simple research agenda for understanding
emotional responding that rivals the commonsense paradigm. One reason
for the success of the commonsense model is that it is simple to state: emo-
tions are packets of responses that result from mechanisms in the human
brain and body that derive from the evolutionary past. It is this simplic-
ity that has led to elegant and clear hypotheses that have guided emotion
research for almost a century. There are several modern models that might
serve to inspire a new paradigm grounded in the idea that emotions are
not biologically given, however (e.g., Averill, 1980; Clore and Ortony,
2000; Mesquita, 2003; Ochsner and Barrett, 2001; Owren, Rendell, and
Bachorowski, 2005; Rolls, 1999; Russell, 2003; Shweder, 1993, 1994;
Smith and Ellsworth, 1985; Solomon, 2003). Although these models differ
from one another in their surface features, they all assume, as did Wundt
(1897), that emotions are events that are constructed from more basic psy-
chological processes, and it is the processes themselves that are given. The
goal of science should be to understand the more basic psychological and
neurobiological processes involved in the construction of emotion
The model that I have crafted takes its lead from the emotion paradox
discussed above. If the clearest evidence for the distinctiveness of anger,
sadness, and fear is in perception, then perhaps these categories exist in the
perceiver. Specifically, I hypothesize that the experience of feeling an emo-
tion, or the experience of seeing emotion in another person, occurs when
conceptual knowledge about emotion is used to categorize a momentary
state of core affect (Barrett, 2006b; Barrett et al., 2007).
Categorizing is a fundamental cognitive activity. To categorize some-
thing is to render it meaningful; it is to determine what something is, why
it is, and what to do with it. Then, it becomes possible to make reasonable
inferences about that thing, predict how to best to act on it, and communi-
cate it to others. In the construction of emotion, the act of categorizing core
affect performs a kind of figure-ground segregation (Barsalou, 1999, 2003),
so that the experience of an emotion will stand out as a separate event from
the ebb and flow of an ongoing core affect (the core affect is associated
with the direction and urgency of initial behavioral responses). In doing so,
people divide ongoing changes in core affect into meaningful experiences.
Conceptualizing core affect renders it intentional (about something), lead-
ing a person to experience the world in a particular way (consistent with the
views of Ortony, Clore, and Collins (1988), Frijda (2006), and Smith and
Ellsworth (1985). Conceptualizing also allows people to make reasonable
inferences about what to do next and to communicate their experience to
others in an efficient manner. The conceptual knowledge that is called forth

THE SCIENCE OF EMOTION 203
to categorize core affect is thought to be tailored to the immediate situa-
tion, represented in sensory-motor cortices, acquired from prior experience,
and supported by language. Categorizing the flux and flow of core affect
into a discrete experience of emotion corresponds to the colloquial idea of
âhaving an emotion.â
When combined, core affect and conceptual knowledge about emotion
produce a highly flexible system that can account for the full richness and
range of experience that characterizes human emotional life, including the
appearance of distinct biobehavioral profiles of emotional response when
they occur. The ability to categorize confers some adaptive advantage, and
so it is likely to have been evolutionarily preserved, even if the specific cat-
egories are not. Many cultures may share the basic-level emotion concepts
in Western culture, including anger, sadness, and fear, undoubtedly because
these concepts are optimal tools for coping in the typical human environ-
ment: living in large groups with complicated relational rules.
Taken together, the basic propositions of the conceptual act model of
emotion map a novel research agenda for the psychological construction
of emotion with several distinctive features. First, it hypothesizes that the
basic building blocks of emotional life are conceptual and affective, and so
understanding each of the processes and how they constrain one another
would be central to the study of emotion. The evolutionary legacy to the
newborn is not a set of modular emotion circuits that are hardwired into
the brain, but rather a set of mechanisms that compute core affect, as well
as those that allow category learning. It is also possible to use this approach
to examine how affective and conceptual changes configure to produce the
effect of emotion on such diverse outcomes as economic decisions (Loew-
enstein and Lerner, 2003), stereotyping (Bodenhausen and Moreno, 2000;
DeSteno and Dasgupta, 2004), and moral reasoning (Haidt, 2001; Greene,
Nystrom et al., 2004), as well as how each contributes to emotional change,
as in the treatment of emotional disorders. Some treatments (such as phar-
macotherapy) may be more effective at producing affective change; others
(such as the emotion resocialization that is thought to occur in some forms
of psychotherapy) might be more likely to produce conceptual change, leav-
ing affective responding untouched (Quigley and Barrett, 1999).
Second, the conceptual act model focuses on the need to understand
the richness and diversity of emotional life in humans that was highlighted
by William James. In doing so, the model will move the science of emotion
away from its current focus on a small set of canonical forms that are seen
rarely in everyday life. Specifically, it will lead scientists to expect, rather
than to treat as error and explain away, variations in the form and func-
tions of emotional responses. The conceptual act model not only helps to
explain why some individuals are better able to distinguish between discrete
emotional states than are others (i.e., why they differ in emotional granular-

204 HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN MILITARY CONTEXTS
ity), but it also predicts that any emotion will differ from one instance to
the next, even in the same person.
Third, the conceptual act model suggests an intrinsic role for language
in perceiving emotions in the behaviors of other people (see Lindquist et
al., 2006). It is consistent with the linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf,
1956), which states that language forms the basis of experience. In the case
of emotion, language shapes core affective phenomena into the emotional
reality that people experience. Language not only enters into the catego-
rization process, but it also directs the development of knowledge about
emotion categories in the first place. Language guides what nonlinguistic
information is included in an emotion category as it is being constructed
during the learning process. As a result, the conceptual act model provides
a means for understanding the role of language in cultural, as well as in
individual, differences in the experience of emotion.
Fourth, the conceptual act model rescues the experience of emotion
from obscurity. Some models treat experience as epiphenomenal to the
scientific study of emotion (e.g., LeDoux, 1996); in the conceptual act
model, it is given a central place in characterizing what emotions are and
how they function in the economy of the mind and behavior. At its core,
the conceptual act model of emotion assumes that emotions do not have an
ontological status separate from peopleâs perception of them.
Fifth, the conceptual act model suggests that conceptualizing core affect
is a skill. Some people may be better than others at tailoring conceptual
knowledge to meet the needs of situated action (Barsalou, 2003). This skill
for wielding conceptual knowledge about emotion might be considered a
core aspect of emotional intelligence. If conceptualizations of a given emo-
tion category lead to the experience of emotion, then constructing such an
experience is also a skill. Presumably, there is not one experience of anger,
but many, and the one that emerges in a given instance depends on the
content of the simulation. It is a skill to simulate the most appropriate or
effective representation or even to know when to inhibit a simulated con-
ceptualization that has been incidentally primed. Presumably, this skill can
be both measured and trained.
Finally, the conceptual act model leads to reflections on why scientists
typically theorize about and focus their empirical efforts on prototypical
emotional episodes, that is, what most people consider the clearest cases
of emotion that necessarily have all of the component parts (Russell, 2003;
Russell and Barrett, 1999), even though such episodes are quite rare and the
nonprototypical cases are more frequent in our everyday lives. The answer
may be that it is a natural consequence of the way that categories work.
Emotion categories can be thought of as goal-directed categories that de-
velop to guide action. The most typical member of a goal-directed category
is that which maximizes goal achievement not that which is most frequently

THE SCIENCE OF EMOTION 205
encountered (Barsalou and Ross, 1986; Barsalou, 2003). As a result, the
most typical instances of a category contain properties that represent the
ideal form of the categoryâthat is, whatever is ideal for meeting the goal
that the category is organized aroundânot those that most commonly ap-
pear as instances of the category.
Research Implications
The research agenda motivated by the conceptual act model can be
framed as two broad of domains of inquiry, each of which contains several
different questions. Many of these would be relevant to research that may
be of interest to the military; this section discusses several examples.
To understand what emotions are and how they function in the econ-
omy of the mind and behavior, it would be important to better understand
the structure and function of core affect. There are a number of important
questions that can be addressed in this regard. For example, what is the
neurobiology of the core affect system and how does it influence other
processes, such as attention to and sensory processing of threatening or
rewarding objects? The classic amygdala-centric view of affective process-
ing (largely derived from animal models) is incomplete, and the affective
circuitry is better thought of as a distributed set of circuits that constrain
one another and other aspects of cognitive processing in a deeply intrinsic
fashion (Barrett et al., 2007; Duncan and Barrett, 2007). For example, there
are neuroanatomical reasons to hypothesize that affective states not only
influence how people interpret what they see, but also literally what they
see (Duncan and Barrett, 2007). Some preliminary research suggests that
affect can modulate processing in the ventral stream (the system involved
in object perception and awareness) as far back as V1 (Stolarova, Keil, and
Moratti, 2006). It would also be important to understand how people can
better use their affective reactions as a source of information to make judg-
ments in uncertain conditions. There is ample evidence that people can use
their affective reactions as a source of information in both explicit (Schwarz
and Clore, 1983) and implicit ways (Bechara, Damasio et al., 1994; Bechara
et al., 1996, but see Dunn, Dalgleish, and Lawrence, 2006); however, it is
also possible for people to misattribute their affective reactions (Payne et
al., 2005) or to experience a âfalse alarmâ and see threat where none is
present (Quigley and Barrett, 1999). A better understanding of when af-
fect helps (and hurts) the perception of threat and reward in conditions of
uncertainty seems warranted.
Another important question involves how people learn about threat and
reward. Humans are born with the ability to have pleasant and unpleasant
reactions to certain âprepared stimuliââstimuli that evoke a response in
the absence of previous experience with or exposure to them (for a discus-

206 HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN MILITARY CONTEXTS
sion, see Ãhman and Mineka, 2001)âbut for the most part, people have to
learn whether objects in the world are helpful or harmful. An objectâs value
is determined by its ability to change a personâs affective state. At least three
questions seem important: What are the fast, rule-based and slow, associa-
tive mechanisms by which such learning occurs (see Bliss-Moreau, Barrett,
and Wright, 2007; De Houwer, Thomas, and Baeyens, 2001; De Houwer,
Baeyens, and Field, 2005)? How malleable is such learning (see Bouton,
2005)? Are there individual differences in such learning (see Bliss-Moreau
et al., 2006)? It would also be beneficial to study the processes involved
in overcoming such learning in the moment. For example, it is well docu-
mented that there are individual differences in the capacity to use controlled
processing to overcome a prepotent or habitual response (Barrett, Tugade,
and Engle, 2004).
A second set of questions involve the conceptual processes that contrib-
ute to the construction of emotion out of the more basic and primitive form
of affective responding. For example, little is known about how language
and conceptual knowledge for emotion lead people to see âangerâ or âfearâ
in another person. Presumably, this distinction is important, because it will
determine what sort of behavior the perceiver anticipates in the target per-
son (e.g., aggression or withdrawal) and therefore what the perceiver does
next. There is growing evidence from both social psychology and cognitive
neuroscience research that language and conceptual information influence
the perception of emotion in others. Biological measures of semantic pro-
cessing (the N400 ERP signal and increased activity in the inferior frontal
cortex) indicate that conceptual knowledge participates in emotion percep-
tion as early as 200 milliseconds after the presentation of an emotional
face (Balconi and Pozzoli, 2005; Nakamura et al., 1999; Streit et al., 1999,
2003). Furthermore, when words for emotion are temporarily taken off-
line (using a behavioral paradigm called semantic satiation, which is the
opposite of priming), judgments of emotions in the faces of other people
are impaired (Lindquist, Barrett, Bliss-Moreau, and Russell, 2006), as is
the ability to literally construct an image of a face as emotional (Gendron,
Lindquist, Barrett, and Barsalou, 2006).
The link between conceptual knowledge and emotion perception sug-
gests that what people know about emotion will influence the emotions
that they perceive in others (and in themselves). Yet scientists know very
little about the content and structure of the conceptual system for emotion
that plays a role in emotion perception. As children, people are socialized
to learn the semantic, interpersonal, and behavioral scripts associated with
specific emotion labels in their culture (Harris, 1993). Children as young
as 2 readily label their emotional experiences (Bretherton, McNew, and
Meeghly-Smith, 1981), but how they use such labels is another story (Widen
and Russell, 2003). They rapidly learn the type of psychological events and

THE SCIENCE OF EMOTION 207
abstract situations that are associated with particular emotion labels (e.g.,
fear, sadness, happiness, anger, guilt; see, e.g., Harris et al., 1987), and they
are also aware of the typical actions and expressions that are supposed to
accompany a particular emotional state (Trabasso, Stein, and Johnson,
1981). However, there may be significant variation in terms of how those
rudimentary concepts are elaborated on the basis of episodic experience
later in life. When individuals do not learn from experience, their emotion
knowledge may be more stereotypic and less sensitive to changing contexts.
Those individuals who do learn from experience will have more complex
emotion representations and will have a greater range of personal cues to
activate those representations and produce discrete emotional experiences.
Presumably, the more that knowledge about the situation in incorporated in
understanding what anger (or fear or sadness) is and what to do about it,
the more precisely tailored an emotional response will be to the situation,
resulting in more effective behavior and decision making.
It is not just what a person knows, but how he or she uses that knowl-
edge that determines whether an emotion perception is adaptive and effec-
tive. The conceptual act model suggests that functional emotional behavior
will depend in part on the resources that people have to use the conceptual
knowledge they possess, especially when emotion perception is occurring
in stressful situations (i.e., under cognitive load). A number of studies show
that knowledge structures that are activated outside of awareness can have
a profound influence on peopleâs subsequent thoughts, feelings, and be-
haviors (for a review, see Bargh and Chartrand, 1999). When the concept
âoldâ is activated, college-aged participants walk slower (Bargh, Chen,
and Burrows, 1996). When the concept âAfrican Americanâ is activated,
European American participants act more aggressively (Bargh, Chen, and
Burrows, 1996). These effects can be overcome with more controlled pro-
cessing, but only when sufficient cognitive resources are available. A similar
result may occur with emotion knowledge. As a result, it is reasonable to
hypothesize that executive resources (such as working memory capacity)
will influence the modularity of emotion perception and emotional action.
A cognitive module is defined as a fast, domain-specific set of processes
that have evolved to handle particular types of information. Modules are
assumed to be encapsulated and impenetrable (activities and outputs can-
not be influenced by other classes of information, such as expectations or
beliefs), reflexive (they provide predetermined outputs when predetermined
inputs are present), and unconscious (it is impossible to reflect on the op-
erations of a module). Working memory capacity can produce a kind of
âfunctional modularity,â however, when a system appears modular but
only because of insufficient attention (rather than because of the archi-
tecture of the brain; see Barrett, Tugade, and Engel, 2004). Individuals
who are lower in working memory capacity, or in situations that require

208 HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN MILITARY CONTEXTS
intensive attentional resources, may produce functionally modular or re-
flex-like responses that will be less strategic and flexible, and therefore less
functionally effective.
Theoretical Implications
The conceptual act model not only suggests novel and innovative av-
enues of research for understanding what emotions are and how they func-
tion, but it emphasizes several broader themes that are important when
understanding social behavior. First, the model emphasizes the relativity of
emotion perception. Context influences the emotions that are perceived in
both ambiguous (Carroll and Russell 1996; Fernandez-Dols, Wallbott, and
Sanchez, 1991) and in nonambiguous (Trope, 1986) circumstances. For ex-
ample, people of non-Western cultures have a more difficult time than those
in Western cultures in categorizing facial behaviors into Western categories
(Elfenbein and Ambady, 2002). Although people categorize facial behaviors
effortlessly and often without awareness, this does not constitute evidence
that categorization is a matter of merely âdecodingâ innate information
that is âencodedâ into the face.
Second, the conceptual act model also has important psychological and
philosophical implications for the relativity of social perception. If concep-
tual knowledge of categories shapes the perception of social reality, and if
learning shapes conceptual development, then learning may play a much
larger role in shaping social reality than previously assumed. The malleable
nature of category knowledge suggests that the construction of peopleâs
social worlds may be vastly more culturally and individually determined
than commonsense implies.
Finally, the conceptual act model emphasizes the malleability of emo-
tion perception. If conceptual knowledge intrinsically shapes the emotion
that people see in others, then acquisition and elaboration of culturally
bound emotion categories may influence peopleâs perceptual capacities.
Knowing about a personâs culture will help to identify that personâs emo-
tional state and therefore better predict his or her behavior. It may be that
people can be taught to become better emotion perceivers and, hence, bet-
ter communicators. In this way, cultural competence should contribute to
cross-cultural relations and international diplomacy. Recent research has
focused on the role of transnational competence (e.g., Koehn and Rosenau,
2002) in the development of successful transnational networks, projects,
and diplomatic efforts. Training people to understand the fundamental
differences in peopleâs experiences of the world might allow for better com-
munication and collaboration in todayâs global society.

Human behavior forms the nucleus of military effectiveness. Humans operating in the complex military system must possess the knowledge, skills, abilities, aptitudes, and temperament to perform their roles effectively in a reliable and predictable manner, and effective military management requires understanding of how these qualities can be best provided and assessed. Scientific research in this area is critical to understanding leadership, training and other personnel issues, social interactions and organizational structures within the military.

The U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI) asked the National Research Council to provide an agenda for basic behavioral and social research focused on applications in both the short and long-term. The committee responded by recommending six areas of research on the basis of their relevance, potential impact, and timeliness for military needs: intercultural competence; teams in complex environments; technology-based training; nonverbal behavior; emotion; and behavioral neurophysiology. The committee suggests doubling the current budget for basic research for the behavioral and social sciences across U.S. military research agencies. The additional funds can support approximately 40 new projects per year across the committee's recommended research areas.

Human Behavior in Military Contexts includes committee reports and papers that demonstrate areas of stimulating, ongoing research in the behavioral and social sciences that can enrich the military's ability to recruit, train, and enhance the performance of its personnel, both organizationally and in its many roles in other cultures.

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